Rome 2: Iceni Campaign

25 hours into my first Rome 2 campaign and I feel as if I've barely scratched the surface of what this game can offer. I'm playing on Normal and I'd say I'm roughly approaching the 'mid-game' phase. The game runs relatively smoothly on mostly Ultra settings, with a few noticeable FPS drops during larger engagements and occasionally (for no apparent reason) on the campaign map, so I hope optimisation patches are in the pipe. I've only had a couple of crashes and seen a handful of bugs, so in terms of a Total War release this (at least from my experience thus far) has been one of the better ones, especially compared to all the issues I had with Empire on launch.

My largest issues from a gameplay standpoint currently are -

• Generals and Agents dying too quickly - I think a 2 turn per year mod is in order.
• Lack of aggression from the campaign AI - this may be a Normal difficulty issue, so I'll definitely knock it up to Hard on my next campaign.
• Schizophrenic Battle AI - For the most part, it works well, certainly on par with Shogun 2, if not a little better. Yet occasionally it just goes completely mental. Hopefully they can smooth that out.

I won't be doing a review for some time, not until I've got at least two campaigns completed. There's a staggering amount of content and variety here, and it's going to take a long time to experience it all. I've seen the game getting a lot of flack online the last few days due to bugs and technical issues, but I can only comment on what I've personally experienced, and so far, Rome 2 looks like it has the potential to be the best Total War title yet.